He was named Alexander, the name of a paternal uncle Alexander, born in 1768. The name Alexander was (including its Gaelic form, Alasdair) a popular name in Scotland and very common in the northeast, as was his nickname, Sandy, the usual diminutive for Alexander. The name had been introduced by King Malcolm Canmore and his wife, Queen (and Saint) Margaret. Three medieval kings of Scotland bore that name. Margaret had been brought up in the Hungarian court not far in miles (though far in time) from the Macedonia of Alexander the Great, the famous conqueror. The name was Greek, meaning "helper or defender of man". Alexander Stewart was well-named as, in adulthood, he became, indeed, a helper of man, a pastor to the needy pioneers and native people of Canada.

Alexander's childhood home was Balveny (or Balvenie), a small community or fermtoun below the old ruins of Balvenie Castle in Glenfiddich.Across the fields was Maltkiln, where his father had formerly lived for many years and where his half-brothers and -sisters had been born. Farther up hill to the west was Hillside, the community where his grandparents had lived and where his father and uncles had been born. Within a short walk lived a number of Sandy's relatives on farms belonging to the Earl of Fife.

They were probably descended from one or more of the many Stewarts who had migrated to the Banffshire hills and glens after John Stewart, half-brother of King James II, and Earl of Atholl, acquired the Balvenie lands in 1460 as part of his wife's dowry. Some Stewarts were descended from the many legitimate and natural sons of rapacious Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, "the Wolf of Badenoch". Others were descendants of a William Stewart whose line was known for a while by the patronymic MacWilliams. Both names were, and still are, much used by the Stewarts.

We do not know just what connection, if any, Sandy's ancestors had to the Earl of Atholl but they may have been retainers of the Earl as Sandy's grandparents and parents were still tenants on Balvenie lands some 300 years later, though by that time the land was owned by the Earl of Fife.

Sandy's father was William Stewart, born in 1766 and baptized on July 20th, the son of Peter Stuart (the spellings with U and EW were used interchangeably) and Christian Mitchel, his wife. William was born in Hillside, Mortlach parish, a community or fermtoun of several families on the slope of a hill west of Balvenie Castle. The witnesses of the baptism were William Johnston of the Mains of Balvenie and William Grant of Old Castle of Balvenie (presumably another fermtoun as the castle itself was in ruins). Peter Stewart and Christian Mitchel had several children. I have not found them all but know of George, John, and Alexander, besides William. The family seems to have been joint tenants (probably with other families) of Hillside, not just cottars or laborers, as Peter was one of the people who had to pay a tax in 1798 on a farm horse that he owned. The family seems to have been a respected one as John was made an elder of the church in 1798. According to family tradition, Peter Stewart died in 1799.

It would be fascinating to know more about the life of William Stewart, Sandy's father. Only tantalizing fragments have come down to us. Family tradition holds that he was once a fairly well-off farmer and this seems to be confirmed by the fact that in 1798, when he was a 32-year-old husband and father, he too owned a horse to help work his share of the farm, Maltkiln, where he and his family lived for many years. Family tradition also holds that he was a shepherd "in lowly circumstances" when Sandy was a child and this is supported by the fact that the parish census of 1821 lists his family but not William himself. He probably was away working, presumably in the hills with the sheep. He may have lost his share of Maltkiln in the program to consolidate farm leases in one tenant, raise rents, and replace people by sheep.

We do know something of his family. On 16 June 1793, when he was 27, he married Elspet McConnachie in Mortlach parish. William lived in Maltkiln at that time, a community downhill from Hillside. Elspet was from a large family in Lag-glass in the mountains several miles to the south of Maltkiln but still in Mortlach parish. She was 28, having been baptized on 26 February 1765. Over the next 18 years they had eight (known) children, the first three in Maltkiln and the later ones back in Hillside. Witnesses to the baptisms included William's brothers George, John, and Peter, and other relatives and neighbors in Hillside, Old Castle of Balvenie, and the neighborhood. The youngest child, William Stewart, junior, born in about 1811 (according to ages reported in censuses later in life), was not registered by the Church of Scotland. Whether this was because his mother died before she could arrange it and his father did not wish to do so or because, by then, the father's earnings were too low to pay the fee, I do not know. As the parish did not record deaths, I do not know when Elspet died, but my guess is that it was soon after William's birth. She is not named in the 1821 parish census.

At some point, William Stewart (senior) took another wife, Ann McDonald. I have been unable to discover any record of their marriage.

If it was a legal marriage, it would have to have been after the death of William's first wife, some time after her last child was born in about 1811. The minister(s) who wrote the parish censuses apparently did not know Ann McDonald's name as she was added onto the 1805 list simply as William Stewart's "Another W."; Elspet McConnachie was listed as "wife". In 1821 Ann was listed as "William Stewart's wife", not by name. We would not know her name today if it had not been for the record, decades later, in her son Alexander's marriage registration in Canada.

A son, Alexander, was born to William and Ann in 1813 (according to family tradition) in May (according to the newspaperman friend in Durham, Ontario, Canada, who enjoyed talking to the elderly Alexander Stewart). We do not know where in Mortlach parish Alexander was born.

William Stewart and his first family had returned from Maltkiln to Hillside but his second family did not remain there. At the time of the 1821 census, when Alexander was about eight years old, he was living with his mother and two half-brothers at "Balveny", probably the farm shown on later maps as "Mains of Balvenie". William Stewart was away, apparently having become a shepherd by then, and Alexander's mother was working as a "maltie".

Researcher Diane Baptie looked in the records of the Banffshire Justices of the Peace, who licensed people to keep a house where drink was sold, but did not find William or Ann listed. So, it seems that "maltie" probably meant a worker who made malt, the first step in making whiskey. Barley was soaked in water and allowed to sprout; then dried over a peat fire, and ground. In 1821 there were as yet no big factory distilleries in Dufftown, so Ann probably either made malt at home to sell to farmers who distilled whiskey or else helped them with their malting. She surely helped her husband with his own whiskey production and Sandy, too, must have helped as he was remembered as having known the malting process.

There seems to have been a very real affection all their lives between Sandy and his half-brothers and -sisters, according to traditions held by descendants of both parts of the family. This affection seems also to have existed between Ann McDonald Stewart and her step-children. Two of them were living with her and her own soil: William junior, who might be thought to have lived with her by default after his own mother died when he was a baby; and John, an older brother. By 1821 John was about 20 and had a trade; he was a tailor.

He could surely have lived elsewhere had he wished to, for instance, with his uncle Peter in Kirktoun of Mortlach or his uncle George at Hillside. Sandy's half-brother Peter was his companion when they emigrated from Scotland as young men and, when four other half-siblings settled in Canada also, Sandy made great efforts to visit them.

Elspet was the next oldest of William and Elspet McConnachie Stewart's children. She was born in 1796 in Maltkiln. I have no further information about her after her childhood in Maltkiln and Hillside.

Helen was born in 1799 in Maltkiln and does not appear with the family in the 1805 parish census, so she probably died in infancy or early childhood.

John was born in 1801 in Hillside and became a tailor, as we have seen, living with his step-mother at Balveny.

George, born in 1803 in Hillside, became one of the emigrants, settling in Fergus, Ontario.

Margaret, born in 1805 in Hillside, married William Gibbons and had several children before they, too, emigrated to the Fergus area.

Peter, born in 1807 in Hillside, emigrated with Sandy -- or, since he was the elder of the two, Sandy emigrated with him -- in 1832. He died in Canada in the prime of life.

William, Elspet's last (known) child, is believed to have been born in 1811, but no parish record for him has been found. He lived with his step-mother, John, and Sandy and he also emigrated to Canada and settled in Fergus.

Thus, out of William Stewart's eight children who survived infancy, six emigrated to Canada -- an illustration of one way the Highlands became depopulated.

What was Sandy's mother-tongue? Gaelic, Scots, English? I think it is unlikely that it was Gaelic since his son and grandsons said nothing about it and since Baptist records write of his being a pastor to English-speaking settlers in Canada, while others preached to the Gaelic speaking settlers in their tongue. On the other hand, it is unlikely that a poor Highland farm family, that could not teach a son to read, spoke standard English. I think they must have spoken Scots, considered by linguists to be a dialect of English but with so many non-English words and pronunciation differences that spoken Scots and English were almost, if not entirely, mutually unintelligible. He probably acquired his standard English from the Bible, other reading, his employers, and his few weeks of schooling. Although he always retained his Scottish accent, his written language was standard English, as can be seen from the reports and letters quoted later.

I start with JWAS's article:

My father was born in the year 1813 in the parish of Mortlach, Banffshire, Scotland. He was the youngest son of William Stewart, a small farmer in lowly circumstances. [JWAS's notes added that William Stewart had been "pretty well off at one time".] At eight years of age he went to work as a herder of cattle; and it was several years later, when he had saved a little from his earnings, that he returned home and went to school in Dufftown, for sixteen weeks. This was the beginning and end of his education as far as schools are concerned, but it served to initiate him into the mysteries of reading, writing and cyphering.

AMS wrote more briefly of his grandfather's childhood. He and HSS were both apparently unaware of all but the four half-siblings who survived to old age in Canada:

His father was a shepherd... [He] was the son of William Stewart and of William Stewart's second wife. There were two older half-brothers, William and George, and two half-sisters, Mrs. Gibbons and Mrs. Rennie.

In the 1950s, HSS wrote at length about his grandfather's childhood:

When he was a very old man, Alexander Stewart told one of his grandchildren how much he wished that each one of them should have a good education. They all, indeed, had good formal education in the schools and universities, but grandfather himself received his education largely through the imagination, and a worthy education, judged by its product, it was. To be sure, he had sixteen weeks at school, and it was helpful in teaching him to read and to cipher, but for that larger education which came through the stimulation of his imagination we have to search in the area of his native environment, Mortlach Parish, Banffshire. He has told us little about this: our own imaginations playing on the facts will have to help us understand it.

Some of Alexander Stewart's earliest recollections were hedged about by the simple life of the croft, the cattle, the sheep, and the hens, and the routine of farm duties performed by his father and mother and the other members of the family, including, no doubt, his two half-brothers and his two half-sisters. But his world lifted its boundaries from the limits of the croft when he was four. That year James Duff, Earl of Fife, founded Dufftawn within the parish, and no four-year-old in 1817 living in the environment of the event, could miss the excitement of busy drivers and workmen laying out new streets in the scheme of an irregular cross with a public square in the middle and a new tower [later] rising at the center of it all. The little boy's world stretched itself when Dufftawn came into existence. How fine a thing it was now to go with his mother into the town to shop, to walk along the banks of the Fiddich and see its rushing waters, and to look at the new buildings. And the old ones were there still, too.

There was the old church of Mortlach which had stood since 1417 [or 1010, by some accounts, and had been founded in the 6th century]. No new town could change that. A child's feeling of awe crept over young Sandy as he gazed at it, or went inside where its reverent hush engulfed him. In the sunlight outside there were ladies and gentlemen in stylish clothes such as were never seen at home. He was told that they were visitors, come to Dufftown to enjoy its fine water, its natural charms, and its healthgiving atmosphere. How big the world must be to have room for such folk. Certainly it must be much larger than his father's croft. Sometimes he could see all the way to the top of Ben Rinnes [the highest of a number of surrounding hills at 2755 feet]. Maybe the world reached as far on the other side as from the top of Ben Rinnes to his house on this side.

Smuggling was very common at that time, and William Stewart made whiskey as did his neighbors. [After the passage of a new law in 1823] soldiers were sent to suppress the smuggling, and there was some fighting over it. Grandfather himself knew the malting process.

Play days were soon over for Sandy. At the croft everyone who was capable worked. So when he was eight his father found him a job herding cattle. There were no fences around pasture lots, and all day long the cows and heifers of the community must be driven from pasture-spot to pasture-spot, and then brought back into the barn yards at night. The cows would like to wander along the sides of the Fiddich where the grass was green. His wages for this work were eighteen shillings for nine months' work. At eleven years of age, he began driving one horse and doing farm chores. His wages, which had risen to thirty-five shillings per year with board, but no washing, were now increased to four pounds a year, which was considered half what would be paid a man. At fifteen he drove two horses, and received four pounds for six months' work, which was nearly a man's wages. One of our family connection [his brother-in-law], James Rennie, received five pounds for six months' work and had a wife and family to support on it.

It was only a couple of miles from town to the castle of Auchindoun. It had been standing there on a limestone crag 200 feet above the [Fiddich] river from about the time of William the Conqueror, and parts of it were still well preserved. On three sides was the river, and on the fourth a moat. Lying in the grass and looking up as he watched the cattle Sandy would dream of the great folk who had lived in the castle in days past, men whom he had been told about who fought for the king, or went on Crusades, or stood bravely against the Danes when they attempted to invade the country. Men had done greater things than tend cattle -- maybe he would some day, too. What boy does not conjure up pictures of himself as he thinks he would like to be?

Maybe a new job came as a part fulfilment of the boy's dream, for about this time Sandy became servant to James Shearer, Esq., General Postmaster, Surveyor, and Inspector [see footnote]. His work was to drive Mr. Shearer to his various appointments. There were many conversations between the man and the boy as for two years they went here and there together in the gig. The things they saw on their travels would start the talk which Sandy found most interesting and enlarging to his whole outlook.

Here they passed the "Stone of Mortlach" which was erected to commemorate the victory of King Malcolm II over the Danes in 1010. At about the same time King Malcolm had founded the see of Aberdeen at Mortlach in honor of his victory. Only later had the see [bishop's seat] been moved to Aberdeen, sixty-four miles away. At another time they passed three great stones which were known as "The King's Grave". The Stuarts had been kings of Scotland at one time ...and any boy with that name might well be proud and strive to do great things himself. And on one drive his names came to mean more to the boy, for they came by the ruins of old Balvenie Castle, part of which [dated from the 1200s]. The old place had associations with Alexander Stewart -- his own name -- Earl of Buchan and Lord of Badenoch (1343-1405), son of King Robert II. He had carried the name the Wolf of Badenoch. A boy likes to think that he is himself as strong as a wolf.

There came a day when business took the two four miles away, close to the point where the Fiddich empties into the lovely Spey [here the engineer Thomas Telford had built his famous iron bridge in 1814]. Here was a little place called Craigellachie [from which the lands of Clan Grant stretched upstream to the hill of Craigellachie above the Spey near Aviemore]. Sandy would want to know about that so the story came out. The name was Gaelic for "the Rock of Alarm". Here was the rallying place of Clan Grant by the great rock and here they got their battle slogan, "Stand fast, Craigellachie!

What a wonderful world! Mr. Shearer's chats were stirring the depths of Sandy's thoughts and ambitions. He must go to school, and he must learn. Had not a merchant established a library in Dufftown? When he could read he would read all about the things he saw and the great world, for himself. Having saved a little money (about two pounds, or two pounds ten shillings, I think) he went home to Dufftown and attended school for sixteen weeks. This was his total schooling. As a result, he could read and cipher, but not write well.

The reading was profitable, for there was a merchant who had got up a private library for the benefit of Dufftown, and grandfather got out of the library a history of North America, which set him thinking about emigrating, and in his eighteenth year he decided to come to Canada with his brother Peter.

There were two [actually three] older half-brothers [AMS wrote]...and two half-sisters [who] emigrated to Canada about the time when the Canada Land Company was active in Ontario, approximately 1830, and they settled on farms near Fergus, Ontario, where some descendants may be found today [1947], who still speak of him as "Uncle Sandy".

To Canada he must go [HSS continued] and find a life for himself that would satisfy all the longings that were stirring within his imagination. But the money must be earned for the trip. [Emigrants from the northeast had to pay their own way in advance, as well as providing their own food.]

At that time there was a great amount of reforestation going on in the area. The earls of Fife and of Finlater, and of Seafield were planting and reclaiming waste lands. The Earl of Seafield was awarded an honorary gold medal 'by the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland for having 31,686,472 forest trees planted in Banff, Moray and Nairn. Here was an opportunity to work, and Sandy went to planting trees in the great estates.

On a visit back to Scotland [AMS commented] fifty years after the planting of trees, he said: "There were several saw mills engaged in cutting them up".

A little money was earned and saved [HSS continued], enough for an ocean passage, and the boy that grew up in Mortlach sailed away to Canada.

There was a mail coach from Dufftown to Aberdeen, according to the account written by William Shand, another emigrant from Mortlach to Canada in 1834. However, we may suppose that the poor but sturdy walker, Sandy Stewart, and his brother Peter walked the 64 miles over the Cabrach, the wild hill country east of Glenfiddich, and down to the North Sea coast. A century and a half later, I took their route, by bus.

Do not think [HSS continued] that grandfather Stewart was the only sturdy Scot to go from the banks of the Fiddich and the banks of the Spey to Canada. The three men more responsible than any others for the Canadian Pacific Railroad were all Highlanders [from] the Spey [valley]... When the struggle to build the railroad was hardest [one man sent to his partner a telegraph] message of three words only -- "Stand fast, Craigellachie!".

This the braw Scots did for Canada. But Alexander Stewart was moved in a different direction. If they strove for an empire called Canada, he gave all his strength and fiery determination for a greater empire, the Kingdom of God, more to Canada than railroads, important as they were. The year after the Canadian Pacific Railroad was completed by the three Scotsmen, this other Scotsman from Mortlach completed the last of his churches -- of which there were many -- the little church at Dwight on the Lake of Bays. Maybe in his labors he too had occasion to remember the rallying cry of the Grants -- "Stand fast, Craigellachie!".